I am inspired by:writing, books, learning, education, poetry,and examining the human experience through the written word.

"My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story."

-J.K. Rowling

"To search the book, and in the warming air Parted its dripping leaves with eager care. Strange matters did it treat of, and drew on My soul page after page, till well-nigh won Into forgetfulness; when, stupefied, I read these words, and read again, and tried My eyes against the heavens, and read again."

-John Keats; Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818)

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic." -Carl Sagan

"Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us." -

-Perfumes: The Guide

"He had read books, newspapers, and magazines. He knew that if you ran away, you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters." -Neil Gaiman, in October in the Chair.

"I often feel sorry for people who don’t read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life." -Scott Corbett

"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." -Franz Kafka